Between the new realities of an expanding global market and continued advancements in automatic trading, not only does today’s market never sleep, it never even slows.

And yet, the speed at which business is done isn’t the only challenge facing businesses in the financial industry. Operational efficiency has become paramount as fee-based revenues have come under scrutiny. Turnover among key staff is rapidly approaching unprecedented heights. And regulatory actions like Dodd-Frank and Basel III are changing the very rules of the business.

So how are today’s best-performing financial institutions continuing to drive return on equity?

As Deloitte has observed, “Technology is at the center of almost everything banks do in the areas of growth, innovation, compliance, and operational efficiencies.” And while many of the technologies now driving returns in financial organizations are specialized tools designed to address niche opportunities, one particular ROI-builder stands apart — video.

Financial services business are creating new opportunities for managing costs and communicating at scale with video

So how are modern financial services providers using video today?

1. Maintaining a Secure Library of Video Assets

When it comes to sharing ideas and information — whatever the format — data security is critical. A misstep here could inadvertently expose customers’ nonpublic personal information, reveal a trade secret, or create any number of other PR and legal headaches. Modern enterprise video platforms, however, recognize that data security is table stakes. A video platform like Panopto can provide a private, centralized video content management system (VCMS) for storing and sharing all of an organization’s videos.

2. Scaling Employee Training

Introducing or expanding the use of video as part of organizational learning and development allows you to deliver essential training information once — then make it available on-demand anytime, anywhere, for employees all around the world. IBM credits a shift to eLearning to reducing training costs by 40% — and saving the company $579 million in just 2 years. Recording training activities also frees your trainers from the need to repeat sessions, enabling them to focus on new or more strategic needs.

3. Increase the Value and Reach of Events

Internal and external events can also be efficiently scaled with video. Video changes the traditional event break-even point by serving both as broadcast tool and as an on-demand library — meaning that rather than relying on in-person attendance, financial institutions can use a video platform both to live stream a webcast of an event to an audience of tens of thousands, as well as share the session for viewers to watch on-demand later. Event video doesn’t need to be expensive — check out our Siemens case study to see how their team now records entire events with just laptops and webcams, in excellent HD quality.

4. Onboarding Future Business Leaders

Central to any organization is ensuring the company has the right team members with the right skills to be competitive, and that the next generation of leaders is being developed for the future. The task starts with onboarding, where financial institutions are using video to extend the ordinary one-day welcome into an organized series of video-based lessons that cover everything from company culture to product details.

5. Coordinating Branch and Regional Operations

Video offers an affordable way to share messages and information anytime, anywhere, on-demand. With video, training teams can offer comprehensive onboarding, skills enhancement, and compliance courses that team members can watch as needed. Communications teams can broadcast town halls and fireside chats to employees worldwide. And executives can provide quarterly updates and strategy reviews for everyone to see all at once.

6. Managing Knowledge and Discovering Expertise

Video can help make learning and development agile. Panopto’s video platform gives your team the ability to index and search the actual content spoken or shown on-screen in a video, meaning team members can use your central video training library more as a reference resource than as a memorization requirement — searching for the training information they need right when and where they need it.

7. Preserving Institutional Knowledge

Turnover an especially acute challenge for the financial industry, as organizations attempt to develop talent and sidestep the brain-drain that comes with losing 1 in 5 employees every year. With video, you can record the knowledge of your experts as they explain a concept or demonstrate a process — and preserve that wisdom to share with your team, even after that individual employee has moved on.

8. Facilitating Innovation Through Social Learning

Video makes social learning accessible. Instead of sharing knowledge one-to-one, recording a subject matter expert sharing their insights on a regulation, product, service, industry, or anything else makes it possible for everyone else in the organization to find and benefit from those insights. The New York Stock Exchange has used video to scale the knowledge of their experts — allowing product managers previously overwhelmed by both customer and internal requests for demonstrations to simply record it once and share the video.

9. Enhancing Customer Experiences and Client Relationships

Video offers financial companies a convenient tool to ensure their messages stand apart. Video can be a transformative sales tool — putting a face with a message for prospecting and bringing life to the static text of old brochures or reports. Video also creates communication opportunities for connecting directly with customers — via explainer videos, recorded responses to FAQs, client onboarding messages, and more — that engaging leads and customers in a way that lengthy brochures simply don’t.

10. Supporting and Communicating Corporate Culture

Video enables financial organizations to bolster internal communications, delivering messages that are more engaging and more memorable — helping companies better deliver the mission and value statements they share, as well as help individual offices around the world connect with their colleagues. The effect is noticeable — according to Forrester Research, employees are 75 percent more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails or web articles.

Don’t Miss Out!

Efficiency is the key competitive advantage in today’s financial services industry. More scalable training can drive down expenses. More engaging communications can help boost services revenues. More available and effective knowledge sharing can preserve employee expertise, provide a repeatable alternative to in-person consultation, and enable product and market experts to more profitably optimize their time.

In our latest white paper, How Video Delivers ROI For Today’s Financial Services Industry, we’ll explore how video is helping financial institutions become more agile — helping to scale training and communications while cutting costs, preserve expertise and identify business opportunities, and even enhance transparency with customers — enabling financial institutions to optimize operations and find better ways to capitalize on growth opportunities.